nodded to the woman behind the counter and walked by. She didn’t stop me. She knew me by now. I went down the hallway to the right and opened the door to the music room. There was a piano and an organ at the front of the room and a small grouping of chairs lined up for watching performances, but I knew that those were few. Quentin McKinzie was sitting on a seat in the front row. He was slouched and his chin was down, his eyes closed. I gently nudged his shoulder and immediately his face and eyes came up.
“Sorry, I’m late, Sugar Ray.”
I think he liked that I called him by his stage name. He had been known professionally as Sugar Ray McK because when he played he would dodge and weave on the stage like Sugar Ray Robinson in the ring.
I pulled a chair out of the front row and brought it around so it faced him. I sat down and put the case on the ground. I flipped up the snaps and opened it, revealing the shining instrument held snug in its maroon velvet lining.
“This has got to be short today,” I said. “I’ve got an appointment at four in Westwood.”
“Retired guys don’t have appointments,” Sugar Ray said, his voice sounding like he grew up just down the street from Louis Armstrong. “Retired guys have all the time in the world.”
“Well, I’ve got something working and I might . . . well, I’m going to try to keep our schedule but the next couple weeks might be tough. I’ll call the desk and get a message to you if I can’t make the next lesson.”
We had been meeting two afternoons a week for six months. I had first seen Sugar Ray play on a hospital ship in the South China Sea. He had been part of the Bob Hope entourage that came to entertain the wounded during Christmastime 1969. Many years later, in fact one of my last cases as a cop, I was working a homicide and came across a stolen saxophone with his name engraved inside the mouth. I tracked him to Splendid Age and returned it. But he was too old to play it anymore. His lungs no longer had the push.
Still, I had done the right thing. It was like returning a lost child to a parent. He invited me to Christmas dinner. We stayed in touch and after I pulled the pin I came back to him with a plan that would save his instrument from gathering dust.
Sugar Ray was a good teacher because he didn’t know how to teach. He told me stories and told me how to love the instrument, how to draw from it the sounds of life. Any note I could sound could bring out a memory and a story. I knew I was never going to be any good at playing the sax but I came twice a week to spend an hour with him and hear his stories about jazz and feel the passion he still carried for his deathless art. Somehow it got inside me and came out in my own breath when I held the instrument to my mouth.
I lifted the saxophone out of the case and held it in position, ready to play. We always began each lesson with me trying to play “Lullaby,” a song by George Cables that I had first heard on a Frank Morgan disc. It was a slow ballad and easier for me to play. But it was also a beautiful composition. It was sad and steadfast and uplifting all at the same time. The song wasn’t even a minute and a half long but to me it said all that ever needed to be said about being alone in the world. Sometimes I believed that if I could learn to play this one song well, then that would be enough for me. I would not be wanting.
Today it felt like a funeral dirge. I thought about Martha Gessler the whole time I played. I remembered her picture in the paper and on the TV at eleven. I remembered my ex-wife talking about how they had been the only two females on the bank robbery squad at one time. They took a constant ration of abuse from the men until they proved themselves by working together and taking down a robber known as the Two Step Bandit because he always did a little dance as he left